A Palestrina mass was sung t St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome this evening, reflecting Pope Benedict XVI’s longstanding efforts to bring polyphony back into the liturgy, reports Sandro Magister in his authoritative chiesa.com website. Benedict has profound insights into sacred music and its importance in Christian religious life; I quoted him in my November essay, “Sacred Music, Sacred Time.” I have been following Benedict’s statements on music for almost thirty years. They were the first reason for my deep interest in this remarkable thinker.

ROME, November 16, 2009 – Among the arts to be represented in the Sistine Chapel next Saturday, November 21, at the highly anticipated meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, music is perhaps the one that has suffered the most from the divorce that has taken place between artists and the Church.

The distress in music has been the first to afflict the Church. Because while the masterpieces of Christian painting, sculpture, and architecture still remain accessible to all, even if they are ignored and misunderstood, great music literally disappears from the churches if no one performs it anymore.

And one can effectively speak of an almost generalized disappearance when it comes to those treasures of Latin liturgical music that are Gregorian chant, polyphony, the organ.

Fortunately, however, during the same days when pope Joseph Ratzinger will be seeking to reestablish a fruitful relationship with art, the organ and great polyphonic music will return to give the best of themselves in the basilicas of Rome.

They will again be heard not only in the form of a concert, but also in the living environment of liturgical action.

The culmination will be on Thursday, November 19, at the hour of evening when the setting sun blazes through the apse of Saint Peter’s. That evening, making his solemn return to the basilica to conduct a sung Mass, will be the greatest living interpreter of the Roman school of polyphony, the one that has come down from Giovanni Pierluigi of Palestrina – whom Giuseppe Verdi called the “everlasting father” of Western music – to our own day.

This interpreter of undisputed greatness is Domenico Bartolucci, for decades the “permanent maestro” of the Sistine Chapel choir, the pope’s choir, and now, at age 93, still a miraculously adept director of Palestrina.

Bartolucci is a living witness of the elimination of liturgical music from the West, but also of its possible rebirth. The last time he conducted a complete Mass by Palestrina at Saint Peter’s was all the way back in 1963. The last time he conducted the Sistine Chapel choir was in 1997. That year he was brutally dismissed, and without him the choir fell into a modest state.

But now comes its return – powerfully symbolic – to the basilica built over the tomb of the prince of the apostles.

Some of the musical choices are curious, though.

The context within which Bartolucci will return to conduct a Mass at Saint Peter’s is that of the International Festival of Sacred Music and Art, which is held each fall in the basilicas of Rome, and is marking its eighth edition this year.

The program this year has two focal points: Roman polyphony, and organ music.

The Wiener Philarmoniker is a constant presence at the Festival of Sacred Art and Music. Of all the major orchestras of the world, it is the one in which sacred and profane music are most closely intertwined.

For the next edition of the festival, the Wiener Philarmoniker has already agreed to perform Bruckner’s ninth symphony and a selection from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in the Roman basilica of Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls, on October 26, 2010.

Wagner’s paean to sex and death is an overripe plum that I never have been able to listen to all the way through. It is one of those icons of art that (like Bergmann’s “The Seventh Seal”) are inferior to their later lampoons. Wagner’s use of musical ambiguity in “Tristan” is masterful–witness the difficulty that theorists have had analyzing the so-called Tristan chord, which is not a chord at all but a freeze-frame of passing motion. But there is no major work of Western music that is more un-Christian, excepting some of Wagner’s other operas. Why this would turn up on a Vatican-sponsored program at a Rome church is beyond my reckoning.

Brahms and his circle abominated the “New German Music” of Wagner and Liszt, a view that informed the work of the great Viennese music theorist Heinrich Schenker. I argued briefly in the “Sacred Music” article that the use of time in Wagner undermines the teleological structure of classical music–which is precisely what makes it so appropriate to Christian worship.

That’s water under the bridge. If I ever have the opportunity to speak to Benedict XVI, I will talk to him not about Wagner, but about the First Morocco Crisis of 1905.

…discussing Bernanke, gold and  the dollar.

Charles Krauthammer was trained as a psychiatrist. I often took issue with his foreign policy reading during the Bush administration. But his column on medicalizing mass murder really nails it. Just in case you missed it: a classic.

What a surprise – that someone who shouts “Allahu akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.

“I cringe that he’s a Muslim… I think he’s probably just a nut case,” said Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time’s Joe Klein decried “odious attempts by Jewish extremists… to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs.”

While none could match Klein’s peculiar cherchez-le-juifmotif, the popular story line was of an army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

They suffered. He listened. He snapped.

Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?

And what about civilian psychiatrists – not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics – who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?

IT’S BEEN decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.

From my “Spengler” essay at Asia Times this morning:

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) wrote tragedies about Europe’s wars of religion that serve as Europe’s epitaph. “History brought forth a great moment,” the German poet, philosopher, historian and playwright wrote of the French Revolution, the defining event of his lifetime, “but the moment found a mediocre people.”

The 250th anniversary of his birth came and went on November 10 with less attention than it deserved. Schiller created a new kind of tragedy, in which the flaw applies to the people as much as to the protagonists. The hand of destiny is revealed as the tramp of boots on the ground worn by human beings with real needs and passions. The Chorus itself becomes a tragic actor.The Weimar Classic of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schiller, Johann Gottfried von Herder and Christoph Martin Wieland proposed to substitute art for religion long before the Victorian schoolmaster, Matthew Arnold. Victorian aesthetics, like Victorian parlor verse, is to a great extent second-hand Schiller.

Schiller’s aesthetic philosophy is a period curiosity – academic scholarship treats it as a minor commentary on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. I am not sure whether this is correct, but I doubt it is worth the trouble to find out. The best reason to read it today is so as not to have to read Matthew Arnold. As a pedagogical insight, Schiller’s notion of Spieltrieb, the play-impulse that unifies form and substance through artistic beauty, still has some influence through such currents as Waldorf education.

Like Kant’s categorical imperative and schemes for universal peace, Schiller’s hopes for social improvement through aesthetic education seem quaint to us. Schiller the philosopher of art is much less interesting than Schiller the artist, though. His best work still convulses the heart, as Coleridge said.

“Only through the morning-gate of the Beautiful do you make your way into the land of cognition,” Schiller wrote in one of his most famous (and worst) poems, The Artists (1789). As a playwright, though, Schiller felicitously ignored his own aesthetic doctrine, which advanced the conceit of the “beautiful soul”, the perfected human personality who can integrate life through a Hellenistic appreciation of beauty. But the characters that still convulse the hearts of theater audiences are not “beautiful souls” but desperately flawed human beings whose residual capacity for good makes their predicament tragic rather than sordid.

Coleridge responded to the bandit Karl Moor in The Robbers, who took to a life of crime after calumny caused his disinheritance. The Catholic queen Mary Stuart, an adulteress and mariticide, becomes a figure of pathos and sympathy in his eponymous 1801 drama, which ran for months last year in London and New York in Peter Oswald’s English version.

There are few moments in theater more chilling than the concluding chorus sung in Wallenstein’s Camp, the first of the Wallenstein trilogy by the Soldateska, the “new people” whom the imperial field-marshal of the Thirty Years’ War has summoned together from every corner of Europe. A minor Bohemian noble, Wallenstein crushed the Protestant revolt against the Austrian empire by raising a mercenary army that was large enough to live off the land. But his success ruined civil society and turned the Thirty Years’ War into a horror that killed more than a third of the population of Central Europe. In Chinese terms of reference, imagine that the emperor had elevated a bandit rebel to commander of all imperial forces in order to defeat a rival.